Guardian reporting:
There's a predictable buzz of futurology as the FT announces that its digital subscription circulation (301,471 and rising) has passed its print sales (297,227 and falling). How long will it be before pink paper and pounding presses are mere memories? Now, with subscriptions swelling, the FT looks far better placed for such online transition, a digital trailblazer by choice rather than force of circumstance.
Yet hang around for a few more earthbound moments. Nobody, to be honest, can be quite sure yet what such progress means in hard cash terms: the Columbia Journalism Review punches whatever numbers it can find and pronounces FT accounting somewhat "opaque". It's fashionable enough for struggling publications to talk of going online-only. Newsweek hinted at just that transition the other day. But digital existence can also be low profile, going on totally obscure. As predicted, Rupert Murdoch's tablet newspaper The Daily is finding cyberspace a cruel pool for making a splash: no news-stand visibility, no TV or radio summaries, no copies passed from hand to hand. A third of The Daily's staff were laid off last week.
It's no accident that big digital advertising launches still happen on posters, TV or via print. And FT editions on newsprint or online are complementary, one defined by familiarity with the other so that, as you sit at your screen in Singapore or Tokyo, the FT you scan there is given a special value by the personality and record of the paper version you can also buy. John Ridding, the FT's buoyant chief executive, may see a long-term strategy working, but he bridles at the thought of the paper being put to death. On the contrary, digital success had given it "a new lease of life" he told the Guardian last week.
Remember, too, that the FT's closest competitor, the Wall Street Journal – is big in print and big behind a paywall: 2.1m copies purchased, one way or another, every weekday.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/aug/05/digital-only-financial-times-difficult-trick